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Roy Schestowitz's blog

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 24th of August 2018 05:14:24 AM

For those who do not favour RSS feeds and are not using Twitter, the Free/Open Source federated social network services are also an option (and have been for quite some time). We're adding to buttons to the site now (they are also clickable above) █

IN JUNE 2004 Tux Machines was registered, which makes this site nearly a decade and a half old. Running this site is more than a full-time job; it's not just a hobby but more like a 24/7 duty, not even with holidays or weekends off. But as long as people find the site useful, it makes all the work worthwhile. RIanne and I will keep refreshing our RSS feeds and keep this site abreast of the news. █

"This is in effect the very same trick they did/pulled with Novell and SUSE (where Nat Friedman came from after his Microsoft internship) about a decade ago."

THE recent GitHub takeover, which has not formally been approved just yet (although there are no foreseen barriers to it), is definitely bad news; it is a lot of things to Microsoft however. It is good news only to Microsoft and GitHub shareholders, who basically sold out many developers without rewarding/compensating them for this unwanted (to them) takeover.

There are many aspects to it: First of all, it helps paint Microsoft as "open source" and it helps Microsoft gain leverage over developers, e.g. their choice process of framework/s and licence/s (Microsoft still dislikes copyleft); by leverage over platform they can suggest Azure, for example, or create bindings to it; they gain leverage over projects tied to governments, including some of our clients at work; Microsoft can vainly tell them, i.e. the governments and their developers: "look, you want FOSS? We're FOSS" (so they effectively become their own competitor!). In fact, there's so much more and I could easily name a couple dozen examples, but I know people pursue/need concision here. For an analogy, in politics this concept or strategy is known as "entrism" or "entryism".

Microsoft also uses patents to blackmail FOSS; there's that element too, albeit many people conveniently choose to forget it. Microsoft is sending patents to patent trolls, then offers "Azure IP Advantage". This is in effect the very same trick they did/pulled with Novell and SUSE (where Nat Friedman came from after his Microsoft internship) about a decade ago.

There are many other angles to it, including programming languages, frameworks (e.g. proprietary IDEs like MSVS), code editors and not just bindings to Microsoft as a host and API provider. People, especially developers of software, generally know how E.E.E. works; the basic precondition/premise is that you gain controls/leverage over that which threatens you (Nokia: Elop, Novell: Mono and lots more examples). So that's kind of a way of getting inside, gradually forming a partnership and then shutting down or sidelining whatever threatens you. Like Xamarin did to RoboVM, in effect killing it under Friedman's leadership. Friedman is going to be the chief of GitHub.

Microsoft can direct the opposition's decisions and its fate. Sadly, they already do this inside the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft staff already has chairs in the Board.

From what I can gather, developers ditching GitHub is becoming a fairy common thing this month. I already see the 1) active 2) large 3) non-Windows ones leaving, but it can take time; some told me they still rely on open bug reports and other 'vendor lockin'; that needs some work before they can migrate; the real alternative is self-hosted git. █

"Sadly, they already do this inside the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft staff already has chairs in the Board."

Robin "Roblimo" Miller was a clever, friendly, and very amicable individual who everyone I know has plenty of positive things to say about. I had the pleasure of speaking to him for several hours about anything from personal life and professional views. Miller was a very knowledgeable person whose trade as a journalist and video producer I often envied. I have seen him facing his critics in his capacity as a journalist over a decade ago when he arranged a debate about OOXML (on live radio). Miller, to me, will always be remembered as a strong-minded and investigative journalist who "did the right thing" as the cliché goes, irrespective of financial gain -- something which can sometimes be detrimental to one's longterm health. Miller sacrificed many of his later years to a cause worth fighting for. This is what we ought to remember him for. Miller was - and always will be - a FOSS hero.

May everything you fought for be fulfilled, Mr. Miller. I already miss you. █

Summary: Today, May 25th, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into full effect; we hereby make a statement on privacy

AS a matter of strict principle, this site never has and never will accumulate data on visitors (e.g. access logs) for longer than 28 days. The servers are configured to permanently delete all access data after this period of time. No 'offline' copies are being made. Temporary logging is only required in case of DDOS attacks and cracking attempts -- the sole purpose of such access. Additionally, we never have and never will sell any data pertaining to anything. We never received demands for such data from authorities; even if we had, we would openly declare this (publicly, a la Canary) and decline to comply. Privacy is extremely important to us, which is why pages contain little or no cross-site channels (such as Google Analytics, 'interactive' buttons for 'social' media etc.) and won't be adding any. Google may be able to 'see' what pages people visit because of Google Translate (top left of every page), but that is not much worse than one's ISP 'seeing' the same thing. We are aware of this caveat.

Shall readers have any further questions on such matters, do not hesitate to contact us. █

A FOSS and decentralised Twitter alternative has received plenty of media attention/traction lately, so Tux Machines belatedly joins in and we invite readers to follow us there if they wish to create an account. The popularity of the platform exploded (number of users quadrupled so far this month). █

Summary: Another milestone for Tux Machines, which will turn 15 in a couple of years

100,000 nodes in Tux Machines will have been published later tonight. This one will be assigned node ID/#99995. Earlier today someone anonymous told us, "I just wanted to say thank you for all the work you've done and new information updates at tuxmachines.org."

That's what we are here for -- to help spread information. We don't profit or gain anything from this site, but it's our way of giving back to the Free/Open Source software community.

QUITE a few additional articles -- mostly puff pieces (below is a complete/exhaustive list) -- have been published since yesterday's blog post, which was followed by a short article from Techrights. There is a lot of Microsoft PR inside the news/media right now (more and more by the hour) and it's coordinated (sometimes in advance, based on what we learned yesterday) by Microsoft. Here is a quick rebuttal to the 4 strands of news:

The Linux Foundation joins Microsoft (not a slip): Microsoft paid half a million dollars for over a hundred puff pieces (in English alone) and lots of leverage over Linux, including a distraction from the patent wars it wages.

The GNU/Linux crowd gets a proprietary software database it neither wants nor needs: This might be useful when Microsoft tries to infiltrate GNU/Linux deployments like the one in Munich, later boasting better integration with Windows than with GNU/Linux (same for running Bash/Ubuntu under Windows 10).

Google and .NET: Microsoft accepts that it lost the mobile wars and also lost developers, so it tries ever more desperately to spread .NET and/or Mono.

Tizen/Samsung and .NET: As above.

That's about all it means. Below is the raw PR, which is intended to sometimes (it doesn't always work) mislead the reader, having misled the writers/journalists. █

I have covered Microsoft's interference with FOSS for over a decade and carefully studied even pertinent antitrust documents. I know the company's way of thinking when it comes to undermining their competition, based on internal communications and strategy papers. Even days ago we got this in the news.

The pattern of embrace and extend (to extinguish) -- all this while leveraging software patents to make Linux a Microsoft cash cow or compel OEMs to preinstall privacy-hostile Microsoft software/apps with proprietary formats (lockin) -- never ended. What I see in the Linux Foundation right now is what I saw in Nokia 5 years ago and in Novell 10 years ago -- the very thing that motivated me to start Boycott Novell, a site that has just turned 10 with nearly 22,000 blog posts.

It is a saddening day because it's a culmination, after years of Microsoft 'micro' payments to the Linux Foundation (e.g. event sponsorship in exchange for keynote positions), which will have Microsoft shoved down the throats of GNU/Linux proponents and give an illusion of peace when there is none, not just on the patent front but also other fronts (see what Microsoft's partner Accenture is doing in Munich right now). The links below are a complete list of the bad (in my view very bad) news. █

"We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger….If you’re going to kill someone, there isn’t much reason to get all worked up about it and angry. You just pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger."

Today The Linux Foundation is announcing that we’ve welcomed Microsoft as a Platinum member. I’m honored to join Scott Guthrie, executive VP of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group, at the Connect(); developer event in New York and expect to be able to talk more in the coming months about how we’ll intensify our work together for the benefit of the open source community at large.

Microsoft is hosting its annual Connect(); developer event in New York today. With .NET being at the core of many of its efforts, including on the open-source side, it's no surprise that the event also featured a few .NET-centric announcements...

Tux Machines has been enjoying growth in recent weeks, though it's hard to attribute it to anything in particular. The following are the past 4 weeks' logs (we delete all logs after 4 weeks, for privacy reasons, assuring no long-term retention).

The above is not the complete picture. That's omitting all the Varnish activity, which handles the majority of the traffic but simply cannot cache all pages. We are still trying to reduce the frequency of spam incidents (some of the spamy submissions manage to inject JavaScript very briefly).

ULTIMATELY, here in Tux Machines we strive to include every bit of relevant news (standalone pages for more important news, clusters of links for the rest, grouped by topic). We rarely blog although sometimes we add an opinion (marked "Ed", shorthand for "Editor").

It has been a long time since we last wrote about statistics. As readers may know by now, we only retain logs for up to 4 weeks (security/diagnostics purposes), then these get deleted for good so as to maintain privacy (we cannot be compelled to hand over data). Those logs show only direct hits, they don't include pages served through the cache* (Varnish) and here is the latest, where the date stands for "week ending":

The above indicates that, judging by the back end (not cache), traffic continues to increase. Over the past week the site was sometimes unbearably slow if not inaccessible. In the worse case we'll upgrade the server for extra capacity, assuring decent speed. Worth noting is that in the latest log (ending August 28th) less than 1,000 hits came from Edge, so very few among our visitors use the latest and 'greatest' from Microsoft. █
____* The cache server services several domains, notably Tux Machines and Techrights, and it averages at around 1.5 GB of traffic per hour.

There has been a system in place to help prevent SPAM since the last major SPAM incident, but sometimes we still overlook some SPAM which gets into the front page, taking advantage of our very liberal and open submissions system (to enable participation by the whole community of users). If any spam still manages to sneak into the front page (often with pesky JavaScript redirects), please get in contact with us ASAP so that we can take action. Thanks to Christine Hall for the latest headsup. █

FOR those who may be wondering, we didn't get compromised or anything. We never had any such incidents. What happened earlier is that some spammer, who had created an account before we limited account creation (due to spam), made the spam expandable to the whole screen, covering many of the pages with that spam (overlay). We are working on code to help prevent such spamming so that legitimate users can post comments etc. without spammers ruining the experience for everyone else. █

Summary: A 2-hour investigation reveals that Tux Machines is now the victim of an arrogant, out-of-control Baidu

TUX MACHINES has been mostly offline later this morning. It has evidently become the victim of Baidu's lawlessness, having fallen under huge dumps of requests from IP addresses which can be traced back to Baidu and whose requests say Baidu as well (we tried blocking these, but it's not easy to do by IP because they have so many). They don't obey robots.txt rules; not even close! It turns out that others suffer from this as well. These A-holes have been causing a lot of problems to the site as of late (slowdowns was one of those problems), including damage to the underlying framework. Should we report them? To who exactly? Looking around the Web, there are no contact details (in English anyway) by which to reach them.

Update: 3 major DDOS attacks (so far today) led to a lot of problems and they also revealed that not Baidu was at fault but botmasters who used "Baidu" to masquerade themselves, hiding among some real and legitimate requests from Baidu (with Baidu-owned IP addresses). We have changed our firewall accordingly. We don't know who's behind these attacks and what the motivations may be.

QUIETLY but surely, last week marked an important milestone, with traffic at the back end (not the cache layer*) exceeding 1.8 million hits, thus establishing a new record. So far this week it looks as though we are going to break this record again. We hope that the new format, which places emphasis on high importance links (as standalone nodes) and puts less important links in topical groups (grouping like games or howtos), makes reading the site more convenient and makes keeping abreast of the news easier, without getting overloaded in a way that is not somewhat manageable (links inside groups are typically less important, as intended). We're open to any suggestions readers may have to ensure we remain a leading syndicator of GNU/Linux and Free/Open Source software news. Any feedback can improve the site. █

_____* It is difficult to measure what happens at the Varnish layer as it's shared among several domains, including Techrights.

IN CASE it's not already obvious, we have been posting fewer links since the 14th of this month because we are both away and we catch up with some news only when time permits. Today's hot day (38 degrees) will probably allow us to stay indoors more time than usual and therefore post some more links (from Rianne's laptop), but a week for now is when we'll properly catch up with everything that was missed and gradually get back to normal, hopefully for a long time to come.

Please bear with us while we enjoy our last chance to have a summer vacation. It's already cold back home in Manchester. █

Summary: Some numbers to show what goes on in sites that do not share information about their visitors (unlike Windows-centric sites which target non-technical audiences)

THE common perception of GNU/Linux is that it is scarcely used, based on statistics gathered from privacy-hostile Web sites that share (or sell) access log data, embed spyware in all of their pages, and so on. Our sites are inherently different because of a reasonable -- if not sometimes fanatic -- appreciation of privacy at both ends (server and client). People who read technical sites know how to block ads, impede spurious scripts etc. These sites also actively avoid anything which is privacy-infringing, such as interactive 'social' media buttons (these let third parties spy on all visitors in all pages).

Techrights and Tux Machines attract the lion's share our traffic (and server capacity). They both have dedicated servers. These are truly popular and some of the leaders in their respective areas. Techrights deals with threats to software freedom, whereas Tux Machines is about real-time news discovery and organisation (pertaining to Free software and GNU/Linux).

The Varnish layer, which protects both of these large sites (nearly 100,000 pages in each, necessitating a very large cache pool), handles somewhere between a gigabyte to 2.5 gigabytes of data per hour (depending on the time of day, usually somewhere in the middle of this range, on average).

Tux Machines reveals a somewhat different pattern. Based on grepping/filtering the of past month's log at the Apache back end (not Varnish, which would have been a more sensible but harder thing to do), presenting the top 3 only:

One month is as far as retention goes, so it's not possible to show long-term trends (as before, based on Susan's summary of data). Logs older than that are automatically deleted, as promised, for both sites -- forever! We just need a small tail of data (temporarily) for DDOS prevention. █

TUX MACHINES has been having some issues with the spam filter, so people who regularly submit material, including comments, may have struggled to do so over the past fortnight of so. If that's the case, please re-attempt and report any issue you encounter to us (feedback button on the right). █

Games: ATOM RPG, Humble Store, KURSK, Liftoff and More

After little over a year in Early Access after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the surprisingly impressive ATOM RPG is about to release in full.
Mark December 19th on your calendar, as ATOM RPG seems to have a few surprises ready for the full release. This will include a third global map, which takes place in a mutant-ridden metropolis named Dead city; plenty of new NPCs and quests; you can drive cars across the wasteland; new dungeons to explore; new traits for characters and a new end-game cinematic.

If you're in the mood for something new and GOG isn't your thing with their big sale going on, Humble also have some interesting choices.
There's another 2K publisher sale going on right now, with top deals like Civilization VI (recently got a patch to make Linux online play cross-platform) has 75% off plus the Civilization VI: Rise and Fall expansion is currently 35% off. XCOM 2 is also 75% off and it's easily one of my favourite strategy games. Even better with the War of the Chosen expansion with 50% off. Looking further, you would be pretty mad yourself to pass on Mad Max with 75% off!

It seems to have released to thoroughly mixed reviews, with all sorts of issues. The big update has reduced loading time, adding in various optimisations, new and improved animations, an improved UI and so on. Sounds like they're really putting in the effort to improve it, which is great. They've confirmed they're working on many more improvements too!

For those who love the idea of playing with drones, Liftoff is an interesting drone sim that's available on Linux. Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing launched back in September, with it seeing Linux support at release.

There's a new release of the Pixel Wheels racing game. It now "remembers the best lap and best total time for each track and shows you a congratulation message when you reach the top 3 in either categories", countdown now has sound and has several other new features. The game is available for Linux, Android, Windows and Mac, and you can get it from here.

Audiocasts: Open Source Security Podcast, Linux Action News and More

On this episode of This Week in Linux, we got a lot of application releases to talk about like Nextcloud, Firefox, Vivaldi, Kdenlive and more. We got an update for the Emby proprietary news we covered last week, there’s a fork. The kernel team are discussing the potential removal of the x32 Subarchitecture. There’s some possibilities that Intel could be Open-Sourcing the FSP and we’ll talk about what that could mean. Later in the show we’ll talk Security News related to a SQLite Bug, New Malware Families Discovered, Apple’s T2 Chip issues with Linux and yet another security hole found in Google+. Then we’ll round out the show with some Linux Gaming news including some great games on sale. All that and much more!

Intel developers are working to open source the FSP, Fuchsia SDK and device repos show up in Android AOSP, and our BSD buddies have some big news.
Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to David Egts (@davidegts), Chief Technologist North America for the Public Sector at Red Hat (@redhatgov) about open source enthusiasm.

Manjaro vs Arch Linux Distribution Comparison

If you’ve looked at the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics in recent months, you might have noticed that the top place is currently occupied by Manjaro Linux, or simply Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivative that’s designed to work straight out of the box.
We wanted to know the secret behind Manjaro’s success, which is how this detailed comparison came to life. Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned Arch Linux veteran with a desire to explore what other Linux distributions have to offer or you’re a Linux newbie who’s not sure which of the two distributions to use, this article is for you.